July 19, 2022 marks 158 years since the conclusion of the Third Battle of Nanking, the climactic final battle of the Taiping Rebellion in China.
The battle itself was a brutal four-month engagement that saw widespread atrocities in its conclusion alongside a death toll of at minimum, 119,000.
Further, it also brought an end to the war between the ruling Qing Dynasty and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, a Christian theocratic rebel state, which had been raging for 14 years and is recognized as one of the single deadliest wars in human history.
The background
The Taiping Rebellion itself has a vastly complicated and interesting history, with legal and ethnic tensions along with European colonialism adding to a series of events that all kickstarted when a man who failed China’s civil exams began to believe that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ.
The background itself technically begins in the 1600s, when the Qing Dynasty took over China.
